Cost of Freedom: meditations on the costs, rewards, and necessity of freedom for all, and immediately for our friend

By Mike Linksvayer

Our friend Bassel Khartabil has been imprisoned in Syria for four years as of 2016-03-15. Participants in various free knowledge movements, have campaigned for his release, using our native methodologies of collaboration, networking, and remix. We have been joined by the broader human rights community, including organizations such as Amnesty International. The campaign took on a new urgency last October, when Khartabil had been transferred to an unknown location, possibly to be judged in secret by a military court. Projects launched immediately following his disappearance include #NEWPALMYRA[^1] which builds on Khartabil's 3D modeling of the ancient city, and two books: Waiting...[^2] by Noura Ghazi Safadi, who is married to Khartabil, and Cost of Freedom: A Collective Inquiry[^3] with contributions from 50 friends and commoners. These projects aim to honor and continue Bassel's work, and demand his immediate freedom.

I understand that this text will appear in the last issue of the Creative Commons Taiwan newsletter in its current form. CC Taiwan has long been one of the best organized and most effective CC affiliates. I'm proud to count CC Taiwan's leader Tyng-Ruey Chuang and first legal director Shun-Ling Chen as friends and collaborators. I urge all to learn from their publications[^4][^5] on collaboration, policy, and human rights.

A quasi-reivew of Cost of Freedom seems appropriate for this juncture. Many of the book's contributors have participated in events and projects led by CC Taiwan over the past 10+ years. The book is personal and inward-looking, certainly native to knowledge commons movements, within which is one of the ways CC Taiwan is historically situated. The book also struggles to critique and expand the horizons of these movements, while also honoring their efforts, costs, and importance to achieving a good future.

The idea for Cost of Freedom goes back to at least January, 2010. That's when I recall FLOSS Manuals and Book Sprints founder Adam Hyde talking about the pain of becoming open, during the Collaborative Futures[^6] book sprint. Cost of Freedom would also be written in a sprint, but with essays contributed from around the world.

One of those essays is Hyde's Why I Refused My Proprietary Self, concerning the pain of peeling off layers of proprietary living. Ironically, the prospect of costs is what woke Hyde up from the path of adding another proprietary layer, of obtaining trademark for Book Sprints in this case.

The first book sprints[^7] were used to create manuals for free software. In recent years, the methodology has been used to produce both more conceptual (Collaborative Futures was the first) and specialized yet accessible books, e.g, Understanding Oil Contracts[^8] and Mining Contracts: How to Read and Understand Them.[^9] Up to 5 days of intense in person collaboration often obtains a unique collective voice for the resulting book.

That collective voice is missing from the Cost of Freedom. Part of it was written and all assembled at an in-person book sprint, but essentially none of the text is in a collective voice, largely due to accepting contributions from non-sprinters -- something that I encouraged.[^10] These contributions give the book more range than it would have had otherwise, but also make it more of a lightly edited volume rather than, as its subtitle claims, a collective inquiry. Perhaps that book remains to be sprinted.

The Cost of Freedom essays that work best are directly about Khartabil or about the broader costs of free knowledge movements. Barry Threw's The Uncommon Creativity of Bassel Khartabil gives a sense of the personal and social moorings of the Free Bassel campaign[^11]:

Eventually, Bassel came walking through the dark to that checkpoint, and with more whispers to lackluster guards I was on my way to Damascus. Christopher met our group the next day, and together we all embraced Bassel's world, one of standing up for freedom, and constantly giving to his friends and community, that to this day inspires us to push further. This Uncommon Creativity, an ability to innovate and invent in the future while building on the past, is what makes him a vital visionary for the Syrian community

Several essays offer helpful criticisms of free knowledge movements, among them John Wilbanks' Inside or Outside the Movement about the costs of internecine posturing, Giorgos Cheliotis' The Shit of Freedom, a rant of love and frustration with movement participants "too busy working on your sales pitch, or curating your posse", and Shauna Gordon-McKeon's Free Culture in an Expensive World:

Acting in solidarity with the struggle for physical security and against abuse is not only the right thing to do, it benefits all of us. When the free culture movement represents the fullness of human diversity, scratching your own itch will leave everyone satisfied. When it contains everyone who shares its values, we'll have the resources and the reach we need to ensure a vibrant and widely-treasured digital commons.

In Transdisciplinarity Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay argues that for many
of us, the costs of struggling for free knowledge are small, and the
rewards great:

The cruel detention of Bassel Khartabil reminds us of the incredible luck of living in such a privileged environment with freedom of expression. My only social cost has been exclusion by conservative people from whom I needed neither approval nor friendship, and this doesn't even happen so much anymore since openness is becoming more politically correct and even hyped in Western culture.

To newcomers wondering if the cost in terms of time and efforts is worth the involvement: it is nothing compared to the inspiration gained and the joy and pride of contributing to a global movement that is developing positive alternatives to enclosures, and promoting social justice, freedom and access to knowledge, information, culture and education, good food and medicine.

Not every Cost of Freedom contribution is in essay form. Anasuya Sengupta's poem What Does Freedom Mean to You, Mr. Government? raises the stakes of the campaign to free Bassel by invoking "names of journalists/writers/Internet activists from different parts of the world who have been harassed, imprisoned, or disappeared by their governments in the past few years." With Liberté, Donatella Della Ratta invokes hope from another dark time (1942) to this dark time in Syria, while slyly dropping a footnote about the cost of copyright and its workarounds.

Tyng-Ruey Chuang's contribution brings us back to the personal. Its last phrases perhaps serve as the best summary of Cost of Freedom: A Collective Inquiry:

Getting to freedom is not cost free. My friend it is not free. MY FRIEND IS NOT FREE.

Mike Linksvayer serves on the board of Software Freedom Conservancy. From 2003 to 2012 he served as CTO and VP of Creative Commons, where he is now a Senior Fellow. In 2000 he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data mass collaboration platform.